Davey Neil paints to make sense of the noise.
He grew up in the Perth Hills in Western Australia, where his childhood unfolded inside a house shaped by the turbulence of his mother’s manic depression. Smashed plates, long silences, and occasional moments of fragile beauty. It meant that from as young as he can remember, he understood that emotion has texture, that colour can hold memory, and that creation can be both wound and way through. Those early experiences formed the quiet foundation of his work, shaping an artistic language that lives somewhere between chaos and grace.
Neil always believed he would end up in the arts, but the path there was anything but straight. As a teenager he found his first creative outlet in music. From the age of seventeen through to his mid-twenties he worked as a DJ and electronic music producer, playing clubs, festivals, running his own nights and immersing himself in the power of sound and atmosphere. Music gave him access to certain parts of himself - but not everything.
But by his mid-twenties something in him began asking a deeper question: Is this it? Shortly after, he abruptly stepped away from both music and his trade as an electrician in what one might call a deliberate period of unravelling. He rejected the material world completely and began living in a tent in John Forrest National Park in the Perth Hills, stripping life back to the bare essentials and trying to understand what direction his life was meant to take.
One day a notification appeared on his phone through Gumtree. A woman travelling through Perth in a van was looking for someone to share the drive across the country to Melbourne. On a whim, Neil packed everything he owned into a backpack and climbed hopped aboard. He had no money and no real plan beyond seeing where the road would lead. For the next few weeks they travelled together across Australia, living mostly on lentils and sweet potatoes and relying heavily on the kindness of strangers.
After parting ways, Neil spent several months living alone in national parks around the Grampian Ranges, again supported largely by the goodwill of hikers and people he met along the way who were willing to share food, stories, or a place to rest. Eventually his wandering carried him north up the east coast of Australia, hitchhiking his way toward the mid-north coast of New South Wales. There he found himself living for several years on a small intentional commune, exchanging help in the garden for a roof and a hot meal. During that time he wrote his first long work of narrative fiction — as yet unpublished — and began reflecting more seriously on what role creativity would play in the rest of his life - and indeed what his purpose and contribution would be to this world.
Life eventually drew him back west where he returned to Perth first to help his mother through a difficult period, then later for a dear friend’s wedding. It was there that he met his wife, with whom which he now lives in the forest with their three daughters.
It was through fatherhood — and indeed the slower rhythm of raising children in the bush — that painting entered Neil’s life in a serious way.
Art had always been present around him, as his mother had been a primary school art teacher and both his brothers were talented artists in their own right. But it wasn’t until he picked up a paintbrush himself that something clicked into place.
Music had opened one door. Acting and stand-up comedy, which he also explored briefly, opened another. But painting provided the key and unlocked the door to everything. It gave him unapologetic permission to be a conduit for whatever it is that art is, and wherever it comes from - the good, the bad and the ugly . Rather than trying to control the work, his practice became an act of surrender, allowing emotion, memory, gesture, and colour to move through him and onto the surface.
Today, Neil works primarily across three streams: portraiture, landscape, and abstraction. Each approaches the same underlying question from a different direction.
Portraiture is his way of exploring the mind — the quiet tension between the identity we present to the world and the inner life we carry beneath it.
Landscape connects the mind to the body, exploring our physical relationship with the land we inhabit. These works often feel less like literal places and more like emotional terrains — the memory of landscape rather than its strict depiction.
Abstract work moves somewhere further beyond. These paintings step outside language and recognisable form, exploring the part of human experience that sits beyond cognition — the part we feel deeply but struggle to explain.
Running through all of this is a central belief that has gradually become the backbone of his practice: that a good life comes down to finding harmony between mind, body, and soul.
Making peace with the mind.
Making peace with the body.
And making decisions guided not just by rules or expectations, but by what feels deeply true.
His paintings are essentially explorations of that balance.
Technically, Neil works primarily in oil and cold wax, building and excavating layered surfaces where earlier decisions remain partially visible beneath later resolutions. The paintings carry the evidence of their own becoming — chaos that isn’t erased, but integrated and accepted. For Neil, the work doesn’t really come from him so much as it passes through him. Each painting is a kind of transmutation — raw feeling made visible.
And once it leaves the studio, that experience no longer belongs to him - it belongs to the viewer.
Looking further ahead, Neil speaks openly about the long arc of what his practice will eventually become. His dream is to one day create a final body of work — a kind of artistic swan song — that he would donate to the state, much in the spirit of Monet’s late works. A body of paintings where anyone, regardless of who they are or where they come from, could stand in front of and feel something rare and simple: a moment of peace within themselves. A moment where the noise shuts off completely.
Because ultimately Neil believes something deeply simple and deeply ambitious at the same time: that art can heal, and that art will one day even help to save the world.